


200 Years Ago

by Numaix



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-02-27 19:19:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13254933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Numaix/pseuds/Numaix
Summary: two asari fall in love with each other





	1. Prologue

1.  
On her hundredth birthday, Aethyta dragged herself reluctantly from the lap of her turian audience to take a call from her mother. His indignation – “You little tease!” – was swallowed in the roar of the bar. 

Her maiden-stage fire of youth had drawn her irrevocably to the club scene, where the darkness and the thrum of the bass and the flashing light and the clamor of the patrons and the dense odor of booze invoked a primal thunder in her pulse. She wanted to compound it - that adrenal rush that compelled asari her age to leave home voyaging in search of something – rather than to sate it, that biochemical surge of desperation to find the self – she wanted to magnify it, to drink in every fiber of that potent, that it would accelerate her heart. She’d spent the past couple years scrapping and fistfighting and making her living performing dances in black leathers that would have made an asari consort blush. 

Retiring to an employee side-room, Aethyta slid the door shut, closing out the din and movement behind her. “What do you want, mother?” she said. In her accustomedness to the deafening volume in the bar, her own voice magnified uncannily in the silence. 

To her surprise, her father, in all his krogan musculature, was present in the image as well, boasting his trademark ruggedness, his veteran scars, of which he had always been proud; he dwarfed her asari mother beside him. Her experience as a warrior was less physically prominent, save for her own acquired nicks – her dealings had been more in stealth, the results of which, as she’d liked to say, were no less deadly. Both of her parents were fully armored – enough that, with her acquired years of wariness, Aethyta had begun to suspect they were on the verge of another one of their bizarre sexual escapades. She was about to inquire about as much when her mother cut in, saying that her parents had just discovered something “undesirable” in each other that they hadn’t known of the other for the past several hundred years – which, as her father intervened roughly, was that Aethyta’s mother had fought in the Krogan Rebellions against the krogans. Her mother, never to be denied the last word, added icily that she had also discovered that Aethyta’s father had been fighting on the “wrong side of the Krogan Rebellions”, and that the two of them were going to resolve the issue in combat. They made Aethyta promise to love whichever one survived, and hung up promptly afterwards, before she had a chance to say anything else, or in the very least tell them she loved them both. 

\---

“Hey you,” said the batarian bartender. “Aren’t you supposed to be out there?”

“In a minute, Solak,”

“You’re still on the clock, princess.”

“As I said, in a f***ing minute,” she said, surprising herself with her sudden exhaustion on banter, verging on intolerance. 

Solak growled. “You’re lucky Jetan likes you so much. If it were up to me…” 

She shrugged dismissively and turned from him, propping her elbow against the pristine countertop he had labored to maintain. “Get me a shot of your mystery drink.”

“Right, sure.” He grumbled something inaudibly as he poured. Aethyta barely registered him placing down the glass. 

She sat for a prolonged time unmoving, setting in something that occurred to her, spontaneously, as unhappiness. When she looked down the liquid distorted her reflection, in the dim red bask of the ambient light that was, in agonizingly slow strobe, mellowing into blue. The aliens around her had become dark blurs of movement and sound in her peripheral vision. 

I’m a century old now, she thought. Numbly, she downed the glass. 

\---

At the end of the night, as soon as she got home – or the dingy apartment that substituted for it – Aethyta tried calling her parents. With the third unsuccessful communication, she switched methods and contacted their salarian neighbor instead. 

“Korbo,” said Aethyta, “how’re my parents doing?”

“Hey! If it isn’t Aethyta. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know – I have not made recent contact. Is there a reason you’re asking?”

She sighed. “Think they just had a fight to the death.”

“Ah. There was a, commotion from their lodgings quite a while ago. I assumed it was nothing more than one of their standard arguments. It has since gone quiet.”

“Could you check up on them?”

“Oh. Of course, Aethyta. I will contact you again if I find anything?”

“Yes,” said Aethyta. “I owe you, Korbs.”

“No need.” He hung up, and Aethyta, after a moment’s silence, reclined back into her seat and folded her arms. Through the wide glass window of her room, the pitch black of the night sky unraveled itself endlessly, perforated with stars and the cold flaring lights of passing shuttles that, in their liquid stream, whistled past; the streets crackled with illumination and distant sound, of things moving ceaselessly, apart from her. In a moment, Korbo reconnected the other end, hesitating - he supplied, anxiously, “Well. No one is answering the door.”

“Tried the back door?”

“I have tried knocking on the back door as well. Do you suppose one or both of them are not home? Should I leave a note?”

A quiet sense of dread was manifesting in Aethyta’s stomach. “Don’t bother. Could you let yourself in?”

“A-are you sure that would be appropriate?”

“Worst case scenario, tell them you’re with me. They’ll get it. At least, they should,” she muttered. Breaking sharply from her gruff tangential, “You need the door code?”

“I - yes. That would be helpful.”

“X1321.”

The comm link’s holographic projection remained trained on the salarian’s angular face – his nervous, wide-eyed stare, as he entered the code and the familiar beep of admittance sounded, as he shuffled down the hall. The twitch of his pupils registering the scene – as he stopped in appraisal every so often before he resumed, trepid, cautious – metamorphosed in time into a slow, blinking terror. “Oh…oh, goodness,” he said; his voice was strained. “Aethyta. I am so…I am so sorry. It appears that they are both…” He paused; Aethyta’s perception lapsed into a haze of distorted figures – he was speaking as if underwater – “…checked both of their pulses, yes, even your father’s secondary heart, it seems that they are…” – she could not concentrate enough to hold all the delicate pieces of what he was saying together – “…so sorry. I know this must be hard for you. If it is any condolence, I will contact the authorities so that their bodies can be properly administered to. Again, I know this must be…”

“Thank you, Korbo,” said Aethyta, in a voice that sounded like the ghost of her own.

\---

Later at night, inspired slowly by a new revelation on the subject, Aethyta pulled up the communications link again. 

“How are you, Aethyta?” said Korbo.

“I’m fine. I think it’s age that did it. You can’t love someone when you’re that old, not properly. Figure you just know too much shit about the world and by then you’ve had so much time reinforcing the same old values that they’re more important to you than anything or anyone else. They’d been together for damn centuries and a war that happened centuries ago mattered more to them than that.”

“So long as you remember, Aethyta,” said Korbo, kindly, concerned, “we are not doomed to follow the paths our parents took.”

“Yeah, because I’m never going to risk it! Remind me to never be that old. If I get to a thousand, just kill me.”

“I truly do not think I will be around at that time,” said Korbo.


	2. 1

2.  
At almost 700 years – approximately 580 years after Korbo had passed of old age – Aethyta met one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen. 

Benezia T’Soni, resplendent in her yellow dress before the stadium – an unusual color, granted, for formality. Her speech had set the normally stoic audience abuzz with what Aethyta thought was surprising positivity given its contentious material; even the stuffy old matriarchs in the rear of the formation conceded it a light bout of applause at its conclusion. And Benezia, graceful and elegant and smiling gently in her triumph, looking for all the world like the sun. 

F***, thought Aethyta. 

She was present out of obligation - something about the other matriarchs riding her ass about participation, saying that at her age she should be more involved with the community, if she was to play her part. It was selfishness in their eyes to withhold the wisdom of her years from asari society. What wisdom? she would’ve said; she’d done shit all her whole life, and now she was older. The only counsel she could provide was what to drink and how much of it, and that turians had weak points in their knees, and that the nuts in the red bowls in bars were for turians and quarians and would otherwise cause cramps when consumed. Nearly anything else she believed in and put voice to they treated as laughable, if not downright heretical. 

Nearly an hour later, when Benezia had finished taking questions on the stand and later in the lobby, and was throwing on her overcoat to head out, Aethyta approached her. 

“Oh, hello,” Benezia said, glancing up at her presence - her voice had a soft lilt to it, like a melody. 

“Hey,” said Aethyta, for lack of better words.

Benezia inclined her head slightly in invitation and offered, “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

“Heard your speech,” said Aethyta, taking the cue and deciding to cut to the chase with it – a little too bluntly, she thought, in seconds of retrospect. “I agreed with everything you said – about how we need to make progress now, changes to our old ways. Shit, I’ve been trying to get those matriarchs off their asses for centuries, but nothing I could say to them in all those hundreds of years could get through to them the way you could.” She was momentarily apprehensive – that the words that had slipped from her mouth would in some way offend Benezia who, up to now, had been the epitome of propriety – but Benezia continued to look at her with a warm attentiveness, unphased. “It’s just got me thinking, you want to come over sometime? I’d like to, uh, talk politics.”

“That’s an interesting proposition,” she said – almost shyly, Aethyta registered. Her eyes had shifted to the ground, but returned with bolstered confidence - a flicker of a smile. “I’d love to. Though I have a feeling you’d be more interested in comparing notes on asari biology?”

Aethyta laughed, startling herself with the sound of it. She scratched the ridged back of her own neck, suddenly abashed; an unfamiliar heat was flooding her face. “Goddess, you’re smart.”

For what seemed like another century Benezia studied her thoughtfully, belying nothing. Presently, she scanned the room and said, in a conspiratorially low voice, “I am free tonight, Miss…?”

“Aethyta,” said Aethyta, instantly. 

“Benezia,” Benezia provided. “Though,” she appended, with a glimmer of playfulness, “I am sure you already knew.”

\---

Aethyta had been sleeping around the past couple of centuries – even pushed out a couple of daughters of her own – but at this stage the rampant fire was winding down. She was no longer the line ‘em up and knock ‘em down serial romancer, and she thought she’d lost some of her roguish charm from back in the day; she’d had a couple of asari lovers too – briefly, carefully, tiptoeing around conception. But she wouldn’t say no to casual sex; on occasion she would still go out looking for flings or one-night-stands that could help her pass the loneliness away. Coming up to nearly a millennium was an empty prospect – aloneness was practically synonymous with matriarchy. 

She wasn’t blind to the public stigma of being with another of her kind – an act that, by nature, seemed not only wasteful to the other asari, who thought their genetic destiny lay in procreating with other alien species, but downright monstrous to a vocal crowd. Citations of pureblood children revealed Ardat-Yakshi, demons with genetic defects that, with love that was like poison, uncontrollably ruptured their partners’ brains, their nervous systems – stemming from conjunctions between two asari, like bitter evidence of their fault. But what, she thought, was one encounter. (And really, she couldn’t say no to tits like those).

She’d thought asari willing to partake in behavior so controversial and so purportedly risky were few and far between, least of all someone as upheld and proper as a T’Soni. Then again, Aethyta was hundreds of years old, and what did she know. 

Benezia came with Aethyta back to her residence, another rented space kept temporarily – Aethyta, for all she was, almost seemed to have retained some of the restlessness of her maiden years. She didn’t have much to show for with alcohol, in the very least nothing she thought would impress – Benezia didn’t seem to mind; they took what Aethyta could find and sat together on the couch, taking little sips, meandering through conversation. Small talk at first, with the reservation of unbroken terrain, neither of them chancing the first move yet. Aethyta explained that she’d been taking odd jobs now and then – all this time and she had not yet found a center. Benezia said that she was striving toward positions of leadership – she was hoping for a job on the council; she’d been told she had promise, but she could no longer discern the flattery from the sincerity, and at times she doubted she was all that good herself. Aethyta assured her that she was, that her audience had clearly liked her. She told Benezia she thought asari civilization was trapped in the past – too focused on old ways, on high art, to come back to the ground where the practicals were needed again. They’d spent too long in suspension, she thought, too far from the ground to know that there were issues now, too isolated, too isolating, to care. And Benezia was saying she hadn’t thought much about it – wasn’t art a valuable pillar of society? – and Aethyta said yes, of course, but it couldn’t be the only f***ing thing, and we need to be doing more while we’re young. No more of this backloading the asari lifespan, designating all the importance and responsibility to the latter years, because it’s all nothing and then it’s something, and by then it’s too late. And Aethyta was talking about how she had squandered her life doing things that weren’t of value to anyone, least of all herself. (She didn’t know why she was rambling, spewing everything out in a raw unmitigated flood, things she was sure Benezia didn’t care about – the alcohol might’ve started getting to her head). And Benezia was saying that if it had made her who she was it could not have been a waste. 

Aethyta put down her glass. 

“You are so f***ing hot,” she said. 

\---

In the early morning, in the dark, Benezia shifted beside Aethyta. She was contoured in the moonlight, the sharp edge of her shoulder blade and the curve of her crest, her bare skin luminescent in the dim. Aethyta, in a memory of touch, recalled nothing more than a fleeting, warm contact the night before – the rest of it a haze, Benezia folding contentedly into her arms – pleasant, ecstatic even, but neither of them melding.

“Leaving already?” Aethyta mumbled drowsily. 

“Sorry,” Benezia said, just barely above the cusp of a whisper. “I did not mean to wake you. I need to go.”

Aethyta meant to say more, say something suggestive – was she sure she didn’t want to stay longer? or that there could be a round two, but she knew it was done. Will I see you again? she wanted to say, if anything, but they wouldn’t, couldn’t – there was nothing lasting, no future in a relationship between two asari. 

\---

In the morning, when Benezia was gone and the sun was filtering through the vast empty in the room that she had left. It felt strangely cold in her wake, and Aethyta sloppily dressed herself, suppressing the odd ache in her head and in her chest. Post-drinking migraine, a little hung over. 

_Forget about it,_ Aethyta thought. _It’s not like you’re ever going to see her again._


	3. 2

3.  
They had several more trysts, meeting at parties or outside of bars or once, by incident, in the gardens. Aethyta usually offered to take Benezia back to her own place – in the latter encounter, Benezia had suggested, “I live nearby”. Is that so? Aethyta said. It is, Benezia had replied, knowing, with her mysterious smile. Well, Benezia T’Soni, Aethyta said devilishly, I’d love to check out your real estate. (It wasn’t a particularly good line in retrospect, but it drew its intended response).

The tidiness in Benezia’s residence made an entropic cesspit of Aethyta’s by comparison – Aethyta felt nearly estranged in it. In the morning, she woke up early to make eggs (the only thing she could find in Benezia’s storage unit that she knew what to do with – she was never that great of a cook), and Benezia came down the hall in nothing but her robe. She looked unfairly good in the early light; when she came up behind Aethyta she placed a hand on her arm, and against all of Aethyta’s better judgment a flush of pleasure diffused through her skin from the point of contact. “Good morning,” Benezia said. 

“Morning,” said Aethyta. “I’m making you eggs,” she added, hoping it would be obvious – and all at once crookedly, dazed, regretful, unable to withhold the words on their inevitable track from her mind, “We can’t keep seeing each other like this.”

“I know,” Benezia said softly, and kissed her on the neck. 

And her stomach ached, because she wanted something she couldn’t have. And she thought of her parents, destroying each other after centuries of what they thought was l- what to them was being continual with someone else (that, in the bigger picture, meant nothing) but what her brain knew her gut couldn’t, and she thought, shit, shit, shit. 

\---

They met again, in Janiris, when the lovers were placing wreaths of flowers on each others’ heads, and Aethyta felt that everything had spiraled out of her control. The universe, with its cruel trajectory, put Benezia back into her path – initially formal, her greeting, lovely as anything; when she put her hand on Aethyta’s, Aethyta was gripped by a feeling of vertigo, as though she was physically falling. Are you busy? Benezia had asked - busy enough to not spend time with you? Aethyta had almost replied with incredulity. Her insides ached, but she couldn’t place the feeling – maybe it was just that it’d been a while since she’d f***ed anyone and the want was rekindling itself inside of her. She didn’t know. 

It was the festival, and they went back to Benezia’s apartment. Lying in her bed in the aftermath the next morning, Aethyta could trace the sunlight along the now intimately familiar curves on the back of Benezia’s neck, and she thought she was beautiful. And Aethyta was ashamed. 

\---

They stopped after that, and Benezia kept going to her speeches and debates and being an inspiration to the masses, and Aethyta kept drinking, and not seeing her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do asari eat eggs??


	4. 3

4.  
When she saw Benezia at the debate, Aethyta half expected that she would not remember her. It had been a couple of decades since they had last seen each other, but she looked more or less the same as she had, if not a little worn by the years. But she was no worse for the wear – she was still, Aethyta thought, beautiful.

She was standing by the stage, framed by the floral arrangement. Though the light in the stadium was imperfect, Aethyta would recognize her anywhere – it haloed her shoulders and her crest, and Aethyta knew the contours of those shapes with an old, hollow longing. 

They were calling everyone to their places; Benezia glanced up as the asari she’d been speaking to parted with her, and their eyes made contact. “Aethyta,” she said. 

“Benezia T’Soni.” Aethyta’s mouth had gone dry. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Yes,” said Benezia, composedly, but not without a certain gentleness. 

“Well, they’re starting soon, huh?” Aethyta said. “Got a seat yet?”

“Actually,” said Benezia, “I will be taking part in the debate.”

Shit. Of course she was. 

\---

Benezia argued for policies concerning integrating more with other species – that had always been a particular drive of hers. She wanted more sway over the galaxy. Her opponent wanted to hold to traditional values in their seclusion; what good, they countered, could advanced asari society get from mingling with the rest of the rabble.

Their genetic traits, for one, Benezia said. She cited the benefits that broader society was already acknowledging, the now long-established norm of drawing asari diversity from the gene pools of different species altogether - what could be gained when asari mate with more than just other asari. (Aethyta felt something strangely like pain then, and she looked down). 

With all due respect, procreating, Miss T’Soni, said her opponent, is an entirely different matter than politics. 

Is it so different? Benezia said. Think of their strengths – strengths that even we do not possess. Forming alliances with them can only extend our own range of capability. In the window behind her, Aethyta saw the sun setting in the evening, its disc of light bleeding, like a punctured yolk. In the haze of her mind, she was momentarily distracted by it. How much more we could be if we worked with other species, Benezia was saying.

It was bold of her. Aethyta found herself mentally sparring with parts of her arguments – there was a rationality in the back of her mind that they chafed against. It revolted against even Aethyta’s traditional logic, and Aethyta didn’t even know she had that – Aethyta had always herself supported asari sticking up for themselves. Hell, she loved integration with other species socially, but she’d always felt derisive of proposed notions that they should let other species get into their business or for a matter of fact get into theirs. They had enough issues of their own to sort out before they went gallivanting around the galaxy in the name of peace and love trying to fortify themselves with other civilizations. As far as she was concerned they couldn’t keep piling more stories onto the tower if the structure was unstable. And it felt strange, to disagree – when Benezia was so smart, so confident, when up on the stage she knew what to say to parry everything that was shot at her. And was it who was factually or objectively right, Aethyta wondered, or was the difference in opposing sides nothing more than what they felt. 

She was gripped then with the sensation that for all she thought she did she still knew nothing of Benezia at all.

The sun was disappearing now, behind Benezia’s shoulder as she spoke, and the ghostly lights were coming out in the city. 

\---

The audience emptied into the lobby after the conclusion, and again Aethyta lost Benezia to a wave of inquiries. She waited off to the side, actively debating whether to hang around long enough to speak to Benezia, or whether to just leave it be and exit before she made herself too conspicuous – as the time progressed, the latter instinct waxed increasingly dominant. 

But at the end of it Benezia came to her, and Aethyta tried for something congratulatory, though she conceded that she hadn’t agreed with all of her points, as eloquently stated as they’d been. Benezia good-humoredly said it was to be expected they didn’t agree on everything. It was nice to see her again. And Benezia surprised her and asked Aethyta out to dinner, her treat – it had been a while, she clarified, and she believed they had catching up to do. 

What she had in mind was an upper-tier restaurant at the end of the block that, despite the fact that they hadn’t made a reservation, they managed to slip into. It was dark in the interior, save for the ambient blue lighting that shifted slowly along the walls, and the glow suffusing the aquarium that wrapped around most of the room. Beneath the aimless movement of the fish through the glass, patrons sat at their lavishly decorated booths, talking and clinking glasses and laughing with the muted energy of a space too large and proportionally empty and absorbing of sound to allow for proper boisterousness. They were ushered to a table against what seemed to be the one opaque, glassless wall in the establishment, to Aethyta’s disappointment – she voiced that she’d wanted to be near the fish to Benezia, who looked away to conceal her smile as the waiter approached. 

Aethyta felt a bizarre mixture of warmth and pleasant lethargy and anxiety and adrenaline being next to her, and her veins hummed with it. They ordered, and in the ensuing silence Aethyta leaned forward and looked across at her, feeling like she was falling helplessly asleep somehow. There was a dreamlike quality to their environment, the dimness and the distant fog of conversation and the implacable background sound of water trickling somewhere with a persistent clarity, the cast shadows of the fish adrift in their aquatic confines, and Benezia. 

“How’ve you been?” Aethyta said. 

Benezia said she had been doing fine – she’d been busy, especially the past few years; she’d been doing more and more in the spirit of making something out of herself, or at least she hoped she was. You seem to be doing a damn good job of it, too, Aethyta commented, and Benezia said, I suppose I am, and Aethyta liked that, that she didn’t feign humility where none was necessary. And she liked it when Benezia asked her how she’d been, and Aethyta gave her something pointedly vague, an “I’ve been around”, and there was something so searching and intelligent, so understanding in the way Benezia looked at her that Aethyta’s heart ached. 

When the food arrived Aethyta had some off of Benezia’s plate, and it was good. When she went in for a second steal, Benezia said with amusement, “Are you trying to eat me out of house and home?”

“You know it, T’Soni,” said Aethyta. She withheld an alternate, less appropriate response. 

\---

When they left the restaurant it was night – they walked along the street in the cold darkness. The sky above them was freckled with stars. Benezia stopped to call a shuttle back to her apartment; Aethyta lived nearby, and would walk home from there. 

“We should do this again sometime,” said Aethyta. 

“Yes,” Benezia said, and slipped her hand into Aethyta’s. “But we cannot go anywhere farther th-” 

“I know,” said Aethyta.


	5. 4

5.  
It was summer, and the birds outside were singing. 

The sun touched the buildings with a drowsy, warm light. In mediation with the heat of the day, an occasional mild breeze stirred the leaves of the tree by the railing. 

Benezia was cultivating a small garden out on the balcony of her apartment – she was bad at taking care of plant life, she’d conceded to Aethyta; most of her flowers were with her only because they had been given to her by others, often out of admiration after her speeches, and she did not have the heart to part with them. “Alright, I’m jealous,” Aethyta had said. That I am receiving flowers from other people? Benezia asked. “No,” said Aethyta, “no one gives _me_ flowers.”

That can be arranged, said Benezia, lightly teasing. 

She was wearing a light sundress, and under the shifting shade of the tree and all its leaves she was dappled in the sunlight. When she looked back at Aethyta with her familiar warmth in her eyes, Aethyta couldn’t help but smile. 

\---

They retired inside, to the cooler living room, shutting out the blinding forays of the natural brightness behind them. Benezia was carrying the pot of one of her ailing specimens in her hands to her sink to water it; it was wilting with dehydration. “You really are bad at this,” Aethyta observed, with a slight inflection of wonder, as the spray of the faucet cut through the silence. 

Benezia admitted, abashed, that she really was. She felt she was incapable of nurturing: everything she touched seemed to die. 

Not everything, Aethyta had said. 

\--- 

She left the recovering flower on the table by the couch. “You don’t think it’s beyond saving, do you?” she asked Aethyta helplessly. 

“You want me to be honest or make you feel better?” said Aethyta. 

“Is it that bad?” said Benezia. 

Aethyta studied it. “Uh, yep,” she finally said. 

“Goddess,” said Benezia, with an endearing dismay. 

\---

But the flower was still alive, the next time Aethyta visited. It even looked a little better, though that might have been optimism.

Aethyta cooked – she’d gotten better at it over the years – as Benezia went over the parts of a speech. Over the sizzle at the stove Benezia, lounging on the couch, read parts of it aloud, and Aethyta gave her opinions and tossed counterpoints for consideration back her way. Benezia would pause in thought, and adjust accordingly on her datapad. And she’d say, How does this sound now?, reading out the revised paragraph, and Aethyta would say, Better, or provide extended suggestions. Benezia would intermittently offer to help with the food endeavor, but Aethyta insisted she sit back and let her do the cooking. 

Benezia’s cabinet was as tidy as expected, and Aethyta fished out two plates and rummaged for utensils in the drawer. They ate in the living room; Aethyta brought the results of her labor to Benezia and settled down on the couch beside her. 

Benezia tried a little of it – and, when prompted by Aethyta as to how she’d done, responded, “Not bad.”

“Not bad?” said Aethyta, pleased.

Benezia took another bite. “Needs more salt,” she said thoughtfully. “But it’s quite good.”

“I’m quite good?” said Aethyta, extremely pleased. 

“Yes, Aethyta,” said Benezia. She seemed amused. 

\---

The flower on the table was doing surprisingly well. Occasionally, as Aethyta came over, she’d joke that its death was imminent, but even she had to acknowledge it was holding its own. 

They debated politics at great lengths – friendlier banters than the public disputes, closer to sleepy late-night speculative discussions. Sometimes they ran so late that Aethyta would sleep over on Benezia’s couch, too tired to make the journey back home, and Benezia would stop to wake her up in the morning as she was heading out for the day. 

One night they watched a vid together, a long enough one that neither of them had ever seen, and during one of the dragging scenes Benezia briefly rested her head against Aethyta’s shoulder. 

\---

The night was quiet, and Aethyta was telling her about her parents, how they’d fought on the different sides of the same wars, and how they’d both died, and how they’d left her behind. Benezia voiced sympathy, that it sounded terrible, and Aethyta expressed glumly, for the first time in her life, that she supposed it was. And Benezia kissed her on the cheek, and Aethyta turned, and before she could stop herself, she was kissing Benezia on the mouth. Her pulse raced - she was overcome with a swelling sense of sickness in the pit of her stomach, that what they were doing was wrong. But then she didn’t care anymore. 

Benezia pulled away after a while, regarding her. She was flustered, and Aethyta felt an immediate apology welling up inside of her – I’m sorry, she said, sorry, sorry, Benezia, I know I was out of bounds, I – but then Benezia kissed her again, quickly, on the lips. 

“Move in with me,” said Benezia, softly, her figure not so distinct in the uncertain darkness, even as close as she was. Aethyta could only find it in herself to nod.

The flower on the table was opening its petals again.


	6. 5. start of the first century

6\. Start of the First Century

Aethyta was stupidly happy. 

It was like a warm, fleeting dream - the first three nights, when they slept together, and in the mornings, when she woke up in Benezia’s bed, entangled with her still. Aethyta had never felt the kind of yearning before, that vulnerability, the need to have and hold and be closer to – and she liked it; being with Benezia filled the cavernous emptiness that wanting her opened. At times she found herself at the fracture point of the word ‘love’.

And on the fourth, when the stars winked coldly and distantly in the sky and the insects sang artlessly in the dark, and in the oppressive heat their skin was clammy, and Benezia opened her bedroom window to let the night breeze in. They lay on top of the covers, kissing idly sometimes, speaking or laughing softly at each other’s comments sometimes, contented mostly with lapses of silence. To Aethyta’s surprise, Benezia fell asleep mid-conversation – it occurred to her, looking across at her, that it’d been the first time they’d spent the night in the same bed without f***ing. It made her happy in a way she couldn’t fully understand. When, later in the night, the chill pervaded the room, Aethyta roused herself and tugged gently on the blankets under Benezia. When Benezia shifted in drowsy response, Aethyta freed the covers from out beneath her and tucked her in, and then climbed under them herself. 

Benezia made a sleepy, interrogative sound, and Aethyta said, “Night, Nezzy.” And then, “Can I call you that? Nezzy?”

“You may call me anything you want,” Benezia mumbled, her eyes still closed, inarticulately enough that Aethyta grinned and said, “I’m going to ask you that again later.” Benezia’s only response, after a moment’s silence, was to curl up closer to Aethyta, throwing an arm around her and drawing her near, so that their bodies were touching. 

\---

They melded for the first time on the sixth night, in some throe of passion, when Aethyta asked to be let in, and Benezia gave, unfolding around her. They’d been going at it with some vigor, and in her sweat-slicked, trembling body, a more visceral ache was gripping Aethyta, that she pushed forward into the catharsis. And she was falling, falling, falling - Benezia’s consciousness met hers in the black indeterminate space between them, wrapped around hers, became indistinguishable from hers.

Aethyta had been in melds before, but past the initial linking of pleasure, past the expressions of affection even, she was immediately let in deeper than she ever had been. She saw flashes of the sunlight on the meadow by where Benezia grew up, and the lake, and the flowers at Benezia’s graduation, and the night sky over the celebration, one of her birthdays – and she longed to be a part of Benezia, in a way she had never felt longing before. And Benezia showed her her childhood, the pain of growth, her own insecurity, pouring into Aethyta, trusting her implicitly, and Aethyta was humbled and shocked and grateful, that Benezia was choosing to give this to her.

And she was sharing stories now too, of her parents destroying each other when she was one hundred years old – conveying, to her own shame, a jagged tooth of anguish still, at the event, even though it had happened so long ago – and the way Benezia wrapped around her in assurance, comforting her. Telling her that she did not need to be embarrassed, because Benezia would never mock her or judge her or hurt her in any way. Benezia touched each of her scars, validating them as she went. With each thought that she reached, in the archival lockdown of Aethyta’s mind, in the spaces that she had kept closed off from everyone else but her, Benezia lifted each shackle, and set her a little more free. 

Aethyta opened up further and further, half unable to stop herself and more than half not wanting to, and when Benezia drew close to most guarded point of her sanctum, came undone in her arms. 

In the aftermath they were intertwined.

\---

While Aethyta searched for a job, Benezia continued to work in politics. She’d come back from a hearing with the matriarchs in a state of unspoken distress – she was not prone to complain, but Aethyta had learned to read frustration in her. So she’d ask how it’d gone, and inevitably Benezia would sigh and explain how her proposition had been largely ignored in that blameless way of hers, that Aethyta had always found incredible. How she managed to vent about a situation without pointing fingers at the party that could’ve been found culpable, Aethyta had no idea. When she had gripes with the matriarchs she had never herself given restraint from telling Nezzy exactly what it was she felt about them. 

Once, Aethyta stormed home, upset beyond rationality, and Benezia had soothed her, next time, they’ll hear you out next time, love. The term of endearment threw Aethyta off her temper momentarily. Benezia was making dinner that night, and Aethyta grumbled halfheartedly that she could help, chop up the vegetables, if Benezia wanted. Benezia returned, smiling, that she could always use an extra hand. 

Aethyta asked her where she wanted that extra hand, and Benezia laughed a little, and it was the most beautiful sound in the world. 

“Are you aiming to seduce me, Miss Aethyta?” she said slyly. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” Aethyta said.


	7. 6

7.  
As they lay together Benezia traced the physical faults of Aethyta’s body with her fingers, gentle against the bare skin, asking about their origins – and Aethyta said, That one’s from a bar fight – that one I got from this krogan, bastard of a guy, he was tough. And Benezia kissed her softly on the neck, and touched the snarled line on her shoulder where the shrapnel had hit her, and said: “This was from an explosion” – and Aethyta nodded and said a soft, startled “Yeah”, because Benezia’d remembered – “And this one,” Nezzy said, tenderly opening the fingers of Aethyta’s hand to expose her palm, “you grabbed a knife by the blade.”

Benezia memorized Aethyta’s scars as she did the factoids for her debates, though she did this silently, without recitation or Aethyta’s realization at first – she had a killer memory; she committed to her mind information she found important with an objective precision that some might have found loveless. But Aethyta, who had crossed that distance to Benezia, no longer thought of these characteristics as cold or inscrutably apart, so much as different in their execution of something that was fundamentally (though she was still coming to terms with this part) affection. All the same Benezia was a mystery of her own, and (though it made Aethyta sad) she suspected there would always be intractable distance between them. They were different people. Maybe too different to anything but a temporary attraction formed by polar charges.

But Aethyta lived in the current moment, and the lingering maiden stage remnant of her that believed she would never die told her that this too could last. She thought so too sometimes – the way Nezzy would look at her or speak to her with the resolution of someone who was settling into comfortable permanence, sometimes. Sometimes when Aethyta pretended to be a monster and chased her around the house shrieking and laughing and protesting as if they were both lovestruck youth and she’d scoop Benezia up in her arms, growling playfully and covering her with kisses, and Benezia, clinging to her, would giggle and squirm with a giddy lack of decorum that nothing else had managed to render her to. Sometimes when the stars littered the sky and Benezia on the balcony would talk of how she’d wanted to travel the galaxy as a little girl, more than anything – and Aethyta joked that she’d take her somewhere, anywhere she wanted to go, but she wasn’t so much joking – and Benezia would regard her momentarily with such a heartrending fondness that her next, teasing statement - “Then, let us start with you taking me to bed” – occurred to Aethyta as particularly hot. Sometimes when Aethyta almost said, but was too scared (it was the one of the only things she’d ever been too scared to say), that she loved Nezzy with all of her heart, and she didn’t want to let go as she’d had to with everything else in her life, and she didn’t want this to end. 

\---

She’d assumed Nezzy would have no interest in being public about their relationship – Aethyta was not stupid or oblivious enough that she did not realize that its existence was marring on some base aspect of Benezia, in the public eye. For multiple reasons. She was practical about it; she’d always understood Benezia’s slight distancing from her outside in the crowd, couldn’t bring herself to begrudge her for that. They never spoke about or collaborated their behavior outside the house: it seemed an implicit given that they were only lovers in their own privacy, though any outright discussion of burying their love seemed inappropriate at any given time. Aethyta didn’t mind. She didn’t see why who she was with should be anybody else’s business to begin with, so she thought outwardly. 

There was gossip. That they lived together, that even then they stood too closely to each other at times, that there were subtleties in how they looked at each other or on occasion spoke of each other by name. Unconfirmed, though not baseless, accusations that swam around them, not so much worded in direct challenge but in scathing implications, dealt in spaces too proper to even say something so contentious of someone like Benezia head on. Benezia took it all in stride – she remained calm and unruffled to such a degree that it sometimes astounded Aethyta, and sometimes hurt her, though she could not quite face or pinpoint why, and frankly decided she had no intention to. 

At a party they attended together, amid the crowds that flocked to Benezia instinctively because there was an inherent spark and magnetism in her that drew people to her, Aethyta stood idly and somewhat uncomfortably off to the side of the amicable cluster, not wanting to stray too far. They largely ignored her. But before the eyes of the multitude, Benezia reached out and took Aethyta’s hand in hers, almost absently, though there was nothing accidental about it. The gesture was unapologetic.

\---

In the backseat of the cab back, over the soft hum of the engine in the benign darkness of the night, past the distant blurring lights of the buildings, Aethyta said, “Nezzy…you don’t have to…”

She knew instantly. “I would like to,” she said. “I would like for them to know…about us.” Her figure was not so distinct in the dim, but she was present, exuding warmth in the kinetic space between them, close enough that Aethyta could touch her, could sense acutely that she was physically there. 

“Why?” Aethyta said quietly, in a voice that was a husk of her own. 

“Is that not what you want?”

“It is. Nezzy, it is. But why risk it all for this?”

The question seemed to sadden Benezia; she did not respond.  
They sat in the friction. The driver drove on, either acting oblivious to or ignoring the conversation altogether. 

After a while, breaching the silence, Aethyta turned back and said, “Nezzy…thanks. Really. It means a lot to me.” 

Benezia, hesitant, subdued, said, “It is important to me, too. That’s why I…”

“Why you’re willing to give up your career?”

She was upset again. “You are not a threat to my career.”

“No, I am. Don’t bullshit me, Nezzy, I know I am. And your reputation. Everyone’s always got an eye out and they’re always talking. Nezzy, don’t tell me that means nothing to you. Aren’t you – ” she hated the sentiment, hated thinking it, hated being trapped inescapably with it, and her voice broke on it – “ _embarrassed_ to be with me? Even a little?”

“No,” said Nezzy, and her agitation melted abruptly. There was a sudden understanding, an almost frustrating corresponding kindness in her tone, a firmness that she utilized to drive her conviction. “No, Aethyta, I am not embarrassed.”

\---

She thought sometimes that Benezia was too nice. Too nice and too caring, too self-sacrificial without even realizing it – too considerate of everyone individually - even for somebody that was a nobody like Aethyta.


End file.
